There's nothing more exciting than building a good solid bridge. Okay, that may not be true but Bridge Constructor offers many unique physics-based construction puzzles that'll keep you hooked until every vehicle finds its way home.

This bridge is as functional as it is cool-looking

Bridge Constructor presents you with a series of stages that feature large gaps where you must build bridges in order to allow vehicles to pass through. Doing so involves placing various materials such as wood, steel, concrete, and cable. The stages differ by providing different-sized gaps, specific anchor points where you can attach materials, varying arrays of materials, and certain budget amounts. The different materials may cost more or less so figuring out how to use your budget wisely is a big part of the challenge. Once you feel like you've made a suitable bridge, you can initiate a test run to see if your creation will hold up. Watching it inevitably fall apart is heart-breaking but that makes trying to come up with a better solution all the more satisfying. The puzzles get incredibly tough yet the simple and addictive nature of the gameplay makes working through each stage a very rewarding endeavor.

Unfortunately, Bridge Constructor appears to be not much more appealing than an average mobile game when it comes to its presentation. The interface is composed of big icons, minimal text, and cartoonish features that ooze tackiness. However, the stage backdrops range from cityscapes to deserts and snowy mountains to grassy plains which actually provides a great deal of visual variety. The background grids that help guide where you place the endpoints of your materials are very useful and are understated as to not get in the way of the gameplay. Overall, it has decent graphics although they can be cheesy at times.

The simplest solution is often the best solution

Bridge Constructor's campaign consists of five main areas with eight stages in each. Working through all of these will take a rather long time and mastering them adds even more replay value. You can aim to get higher scores by building more efficient structures and also use bigger vehicles in your test runs to show off how strong your designs are. Once you're satisfied with all forty of your solutions, there are also three bonus islands known as SlopeMania. These are extremely challenging as they involve you building slanted bridges between high and low ledges. The average gamer will find these puzzles to be far too frustrating but they are fantastic challenges for bridge-building experts. In the end, there's so much content that you can keep building for hours and still have lots of work to do.

One annoying part of Bridge Constructor is that the controls can be finicky at times. For example, when dealing with a short piece of building material, you may try to delete it yet you accidentally remove all of the adjoining pieces because you can't highlight just the one part. Also, I found myself consistently building planks that lead to nowhere because I somehow missed the anchor points even though I was hovering the cursor over them. All of that being said, you do get used to the awkwardness after a while.

Finally, I found the audio to be kind of dull. The music is super-chill to the point where it can put you to sleep. I'd expect a game like this to have a soundtrack full of fun tunes yet most of the music is flat and boring. In addition to that, the sound effects are very corny such as cute car honks when vehicles reach their destination and goofy rounds of applause whenever you succeed.

These SlopeMania stages will make you scratch your head until your hair falls out

Bridge Constructor is an enjoyable physics-based construction simulator full of challenging puzzles. If that sounds like your kind of thing then it's a must-buy game to add to your collection. Everyone else may be put off by its tough difficulty and simplistic gameplay.